Six months on, the Tory leader still foxes voters

Political parties seldom change their leaders because they want to change themselves. They change them because the incumbent leader has died, retired or proved incapable of winning elections.

The Conservatives ditched Edward Heath because he had lost three elections and won only one and Labour ditched both Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock because they, too, were proven losers.

Tony Blair was not elected because members of his party thought Labour needed to be transformed. He was elected because John Smith had unexpectedly died. Only after he became leader did he seriously set about creating New Labour.

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All that makes David Cameron a highly unusual figure. A rank outsider, he stood for the leadership precisely to promote radical change in the party. He won on that basis.

Mr Cameron's victory six months ago yesterday was even more remarkable than Margaret Thatcher's in 1975. The Tories elected her because they wanted to be shot of Ted Heath. Few Tories knew what they were letting themselves in for.

In 2006 the new Conservative leader has made a far more radical start than Mrs Thatcher did a generation ago. It was only after she won the 1979 election that the Iron Lady showed how truly formidable she was.

In six months David Cameron has repositioned his party in the political Centre, abandoned (at least temporarily) its traditional tax-cutting stance, praised public servants, stolen much of the Liberal Democrats' green agenda, promoted the cause of women in his party and embraced multi-culturalism.

Not surprisingly, voters are bemused. Thousands are not quite sure they can believe their eyes.

A degree of disorientation probably accounts in part for the fact that, although the Conservatives are doing far better in the opinion polls than in much of the recent past, their level of support appears to fluctuate so wildly. All the polls - including YouGov's for The Daily Telegraph - support David Cameron's contention that the party's image cannot be changed overnight and that both he and his party are in for a long haul.

The Tories' current lead over Labour owes more to the chaos in Labour's ranks than to any real Conservative resilience.

The figures in the chart tell a sobering story from Mr Cameron's and the Tories' point of view. They cover the past quarter-century and simply show how much each new Opposition leader has added to his party's standing in the polls during his first six months in the job.

At the end of David Cameron's first month as leader, the Conservatives had the backing of 38 per cent of voters in YouGov's monthly tracking survey. The proportion backing the Tories in YouGov's latest monthly survey was exactly the same.

The election of Mr Cameron in itself increased Tory strength - from the low 30s in Mr Howard's last months in the job to nearly 40 per cent now - but Mr Cameron seems to have added no significant value during the six months since then.

Michael Howard fared considerably better during his first six months - but then he was succeeding Iain Duncan Smith.

The better news for Mr Cameron lies not in the Tory Party's current poll ratings as such but in the accumulating evidence that voters no longer regard Conservatives as alien beings.

YouGov's most recent survey shows the Tory leader having almost narrowed the gap between him and Tony Blair. More significant is the evidence from the same survey that the Conservatives in policy terms are now far more acceptable than they were even a year ago.